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0521652324 - Education in the Moral Domain

Larry P. Nucci
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part one

The Nature of Morality and the Development

of Social Values

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0521652324 - Education in the Moral Domain
Larry P. Nucci
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chapter one

Morality and Domains of Social Knowledge

In my education classes, I often start off by asking students to state what

they would consider to be the highest, most moral act. Invariably, students propose risking ones life to save the life of another as the most
moral thing a person could do. I then present them with the following scenario and ask whether it is similar to what they had in mind.
A man is waiting at a train station. On his right, about twenty feet away, stands
a woman reading a magazine. The man glances to his left to check if a train is
coming and sees to his horror that another man, about twenty feet from him,
is in a crouched position clearly aiming a gun at the woman. The man is too
far away to either push the woman or stop the shooter. So he yells out duck
as he steps between the shooter and the woman just as the gun is fired. As a
result, the bullet intended for the woman strikes him in the arm, saving the
womans life.

Generally, my students accept this scenario as a rather dramatic instance of what they had in mind. I then ask them to consider the following alternative scene.
The same people are on the train platform in the same relative positions as in
the first version. However, the man in the middle is in this case unaware of
the presence of the gunman. While waiting for the train, he notices that his
shoe is untied. Just at the moment that our hero bends forward to tie his shoe,
the gunman fires at the woman. The bullet hits him in the arm, and the
womans life is saved.

Despite the fact that the behavior of the hero (moving in between the
shooter and the woman) and outcome (woman is saved) are the same, my
students do not consider the second scenario as a depiction of a moral ac3

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morality & development of social values

tion. This is because there was no element of moral choice involved in the
second set of events. The decision to move forward was unrelated to the
moral elements of the situation, and the moral outcome (preservation of
life) occurred quite by accident. On the basis of this example, my students
conclude that moral action as opposed to an accidental or reflexive behavior requires moral judgment.
Now some objections may be raised to the interpretation the students
offer with regard to this example. First, it may be argued that the act of
saving someones life is an instance of supererogation (performing beyond the call of duty) and is not an example of action based on moral obligation (e.g., to refrain from harming another). This objection does not,
however, negate the importance that the students placed on volition as a
necessary element of moral action, and no one would argue that the act of
saving someones life is without moral meaning. A second, and more
pointed, objection would be to accept the example as portraying a moral
action, but to argue that even in the first instance the person was not acting on the basis of rational choice, but did so out of instinct or emotion.
This position makes clear that emotion plays an important role in morality. Moreover, this interpretation reminds us of how many everyday
moral actions seem to take place automatically without reflection.
In fact, some recent writers have placed great emphasis on the apparent
lack of reflection in everyday moral activity, and have argued that morality is guided by an inherited emotional moral sense (Wilson 1993). The
role of affect and emotion in the selection and motivation of moral action
will be taken up again more thoroughly in a later chapter. For our purposes
here, it is enough to recognize that the fact that a judgment is made quickly,
and seemingly without reflection, does not necessarily mean that it was
made unthinkingly. It takes little reflection, for example, for an adult to
answer the question, How much is one plus one? The seeming automaticity of the response does not negate the answer as a product of
thought, however quickly done. Similarly, while moral actions may be motivated by emotion, and take place with very little conscious reflection,
they always involve an element of thought. This is why we dont consider
the prosocial behavior of animals (e.g., placing their own lives at risk in
order to protect their young) to be truly moral. We attribute such behavior
to instinct rather than to the animals morality. Indeed, if our hero were acting solely out of instinct or automatic emotional processing, my students
would not consider his behavior to have had any more moral status than
that of the man who saved the womans life by accident.
At the core of what we mean by morality, then, is knowledge of right

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0521652324 - Education in the Moral Domain
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morality and domains of social knowledge

and wrong. Conduct is moral if it involves selection of particular courses

of action that are deemed to be right. In the above example, if we were to
shift our focus from the hero to the shooter, we would quickly see that
the persons moral culpability stems from his choice to harm another person. If it were to turn out that the shooter were delusional and incapable
of understanding the meaning of his actions, we would view the events
as tragic rather than in moral terms. Thus, while the human experience of
morality may contain many things, such as emotions (which may be
rooted in our evolutionary history), the defining element of morality is
moral cognition. Moreover, our deliberations about right and wrong are
not confined simply to those things we do seemingly automatically out of
habit, or out of an emotional sense that a course of action is right. Moral
issues are among the most engaging things that people think about. It
isnt just philosophers who reflect on moral issues. Just about everyone
has pondered the morality of various courses of action and reflected upon
the moral meaning of personal decisions. This begins very early in life in
the context of deciding on issues of fairness among playmates and siblings, and continues into the twilight concerns over death with dignity.

identifying the moral domain

One of the central questions raised by philosophy and psychology is
whether morality constitutes a domain or category of understanding distinct from other aspects of our knowledge. The behaviorist theories of
learning, which at one time dominated American educational practice,
made no distinctions among types or forms of knowledge and saw all
learning as simply the acquisition of content or procedures resulting from
environmental consequences experienced as reinforcements or punishments (Skinner 1971). From that perspective there was no particular difference between an academic subject like arithmetic and morality, and the
issue of moral education became simply the application of educational
technology to generate a set of socially defined and desired behaviors.
More recently, however, as a consequence of what has been called the
cognitive revolution, there has been a recognition that knowledge is not
uniform but is structured within different domains or conceptual frameworks. Verbal and mathematical knowledge, for example, are not reduced
to one another, and the teaching of reading and arithmetic call upon different curricula and teaching strategies.
While it may seem fairly obvious that moral cognition is something different from mathematics or text comprehension (reading), it has been less

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morality & development of social values

apparent that morality is a domain apart from knowledge of other social

values. For the most part, researchers and educators have accepted the
everyday usage of the term morality (standards of social right and wrong)
as defining the field of inquiry or instruction. Moral education, according
to this conventional view, involves the socializing of students into socially
accepted standards of behavior so that they learn to know right from
wrong (Ryan 1996). This global approach draws no distinctions among
very disparate forms of social right and wrong, and it offers no criteria for
inclusion or exclusion within the moral category of social norms. Behaviors as different as harm to another person and failure to wear conventional dress are both considered wrong and, therefore, subject to moral
socialization. Thus, there is no sense in which morality is viewed in this
conventional perspective as something apart from knowledge of social
norms in general.
Within philosophy, however, attempts have been made to establish criteria for determining what ought to count as a moral value. According to
formalist ethics1 (e.g., Dworkin 1977; Frankena 1978; Gewirth 1978;
Habermas 1991), this notion of ought carries with it two related ideas. One
is that what is morally right is not something that is simply subject to individual opinion but carries with it an objective prescriptive force. The
second, related idea, is that what is morally right, because it is objectively prescriptive, holds generally and can be universalized across people. These two criteria, prescriptivity and universality, are linked together
in philosophical analyses to issues of human welfare, justice, and rights.2
What we have learned through research over the past twenty-five years
is that people in general, and not just philosophers, also do not hold global
conceptions of social right and wrong, but reason very differently about
matters of morality, convention, and personal choice (Nucci 1977, 1996;
Turiel 1983). More specifically, these conceptual differences become apparent when people are asked to evaluate different actions in terms of criteria similar to those set out in formalist ethics.
1

Formalist ethics is not the only philosophical system to be concerned with definitions
of morality. I bring in formal criteria here as a way of illustrating the basic distinctions
that can be made between morality and the conventions of society. These same kinds of
distinctions are also made by children and adults in their own natural reasoning about
social and moral issues. People also combine formalist with nonformalist ideas in their
moral cognition. Some of these nonformalist aspects of everyday morality will be
brought into the discussions in later chapters about emotion and moral character.
Carol Gilligan (1982) has made a strong case for care as an alternative moral orientation
to a morality of justice. I will take up the issue of care and morality in the Chapter 6 discussion of the role of affect in morality.

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morality and domains of social knowledge

Within the domain theory of social development, morality refers to

conceptions of human welfare, justice, and rights, which are a function of
the inherent features of interpersonal relations (Turiel 1983). As such, prescriptions pertaining to the right and wrong of moral actions are not simply the function of consensus or the views of authority. For example, it is
not possible to hit another person with force and not hurt that other person. That is because hurting is an inherent consequence of hitting. A moral
judgment about unprovoked harm (It is wrong to hit.) would not be dependent on the existence of a socially agreed-upon norm or standard but
could be generated solely from the intrinsic effects of the act (i.e., hitting
hurts). In this example, the prescriptive force of the moral standard It is
wrong to hit. is objective in the sense that the effects of the act are independent of the views of the observer, prescriptive in the sense that the issue of wrong stems from the objective features of the act, and generalizable in the sense that the effects of the act hold across people irrespective
of background. Similar analyses could be done regarding a broader range
of issues pertaining to human welfare that would extend beyond harm to
concerns for what it means to be just, compassionate, and considerate of
the rights of others. In studies on reasoning about a broad range of issues,
it has been found that moral judgments are structured by the persons understandings of fairness and human welfare (Turiel 1983).
In contrast with issues of morality are matters of social convention.
Conventions are the agreed-upon uniformities in social behavior determined by the social system in which they are formed (Turiel 1983). Unlike
moral prescriptions, conventions are arbitrary because there are no inherent interpersonal effects of the actions they regulate. For example,
among the many conventions children in our society are expected to learn
is that certain classes of adults (e.g., teachers, physicians) are addressed
by their titles. Since there are no inherently positive or negative effects of
forms of address, society could just as easily have set things up differently
(e.g., had children refer to their teachers by first names). Through accepted usage, however, these standards serve to coordinate the interactions of individuals participating within a social system by providing
them with a set of expectations regarding appropriate behavior. In turn,
the matrix of social conventions and customs is an element in the structuring and maintenance of the general social order (Searle 1969).
These two forms of social regulation, morality and convention, are both
a part of the social order. Conceptually, however, they are not reducible
one to another and are understood within distinct conceptual frameworks
or domains. This distinction between morality and convention is nicely il-

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morality & development of social values

lustrated by the following example (collected in the U.S. Virgin Islands

during the research for Nucci, Turiel, and Encarnacion-Gawrych 1983)
taken from an interview with a 4-year-old girl regarding her perceptions
of spontaneously occurring transgressions at her preschool.
MORAL ISSUE: Did you see what happened? Yes. They were playing and John
hit him too hard. Is that something you are supposed to do or not supposed to
do? Not so hard to hurt. Is there a rule about that? Yes. What is the rule? Youre
not to hit hard. What if there were no rule about hitting hard, would it be all
right to do then? No. Why not? Because he could get hurt and start to cry.
CONVENTIONAL ISSUE: Did you see what just happened? Yes. They were
noisy. Is that something you are supposed to or not supposed to do? Not do.
Is there a rule about that? Yes. We have to be quiet. What if there were no
rule, would it be all right to do then? Yes. Why? Because there is no rule.

As I stated earlier, the distinction between morality and nonmoral

norms of social regulation, such as convention, has not been generally
made in values education. Traditional values educators, such as Kevin
Ryan (1996) and Edward Wynne (1989), hold that moral values are established by society. They treat all values including morality as matters of
custom and convention to be inculcated in children as a part of what they
refer to as character education. The kind of distinction drawn here is also
at variance with accounts that have had the greatest impact on developmental approaches to moral education. In contrast with behaviorism and
traditional approaches to moral education, the accounts of moral development offered by Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1984) were informed by
and included philosophical distinctions between morality and convention. However, while differing in their interpretations of the ages at which
such changes take place, both Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1984) maintained that only at the highest stages of moral development can morality
be differentiated from and displace convention as the basis for moral
judgments.
Over the past twenty-five years, however, more than sixty published
articles have reported research demonstrating that morality and convention emerge as distinct conceptual frameworks at very early ages and undergo distinct patterns of age-related developmental changes. This research is reviewed in detail in Helwig, Tisak and Turiel 1990; Smetana
1995a; Tisak 1995; and Turiel 1998a. Three main forms of evidence have
been offered in support of the contention that morality is a conceptual sys-

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morality and domains of social knowledge

tem distinct from understandings of nonmoral social norms. The first consists of studies examining whether or not individuals make conceptual
distinctions between moral and nonmoral social issues on the basis of a
number of formal criteria. The second form of research consists of observational studies of childrens social interactions to determine if the pattern of social interactions associated with moral issues is different from
the form of social interactions around nonmoral issues. The third form of
research has examined the age-related changes in the ways in which people reason about moral and nonmoral concerns. Most of the attention of
each of these three forms of research has been upon the distinction between matters of morality and social convention. Other work has looked
at the development of understandings of personal prerogative and issues
of self-harm (prudence). Those latter issues will be dealt with in detail in
chapter 3. What follows is an overview of the research on the moralconventional distinction.

research on the moral and conventional domains

Studies of the MoralConventional Distinction
The way in which researchers have determined whether or not people
make a conceptual distinction between morality and convention has been
by asking people to evaluate various actions in terms of one or more of
the following criteria:
Rule contingency: Does the wrongness of a given action depend upon
the existence of a governing rule or social norm? (The reader will recognize this criterion from the interview with the 4-year-old child described above.)
Rule alterability: Is it wrong or all right to remove or alter the existing
norm or standard?
Rule generalizability: Is it wrong or all right for members of another society or culture not to have a given rule or norm?
Act generalizability: Is it wrong or all right for a member of another society or culture to engage in the act if that society/culture does not
have a rule about the act?
Act severity: How wrong (usually on a 5-point scale) is a given action?
For the most part, these criteria map onto the formal criteria for morality
presented by formalist ethics. Rule contingency and rule alterability both

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morality & development of social values

refer to the philosophical criterion that a moral norm be prescriptive. Rule

and act generalizability both refer to the philosophical criterion that the
moral norm apply universally to all persons.
In addition to being asked to make criterion judgments, people are also
asked to provide justifications for the answers they give. These justifications allow researchers to determine which substantive bases people employ to make their criterion judgments. In the example presented earlier,
the young girl responded to the rule contingency question about hitting
by responding that it would be wrong to hit, whether or not a governing
rule were in effect. The substantive justification for judging hitting as
wrong was that hitting has harmful effects on another person.
In order to gain clear-cut answers to whether or not people make distinctions between morality and convention, researchers have asked people to make judgments that would constitute prototypical examples of
moral or conventional issues. Issues have been presented in contexts in
which the acts in question are generally not in conflict with other types of
goals or events. More complex issues involving conflict and overlap have
also been studied, and I will discuss that work in Chapters 4 and 5. In
studies which have involved observations of childrens interactions, children have been asked to evaluate real situations they had just witnessed
(as in the previous example). In most cases, however, issues have been
presented in story or pictorial form. The types of issues used as moral
stimuli have had to do with welfare and physical harm (for instance,
pushing, shoving, hitting, and killing), psychological harm (such as teasing, hurting feelings, ridiculing, or name calling), fairness and rights (such
things as stealing, breaking a promise, not sharing a toy, or destroying
others property), and positive behaviors (things like helping another in
need, sharing, or donating to charity).
Consistent with the assumptions of domain theory, children and adults
distinguish between morality and convention on the basis of these criteria. Moral issues are viewed to be independent of the existence of social
norms and generalizable across contexts, societies, and cultures. Social
conventions, on the other hand, are rule dependent, and their normative
force holds only within the social system within which the rule was
formed. Justifications people give for their criterion judgments are also in
line with the distinctions that have been drawn between the moral and
conventional domains. Judgments of moral issues are justified in terms of
the harm or unfairness that actions would cause, while judgments of conventions are justified in terms of norms and the expectations of authority.
There are, as one would expect, age and experience effects on the abil-

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11

ity of people to make these domain distinctions. The youngest age at

which children have been reported to differentiate consistently between
morality and convention is 2 1/2 years (Smetana and Braeges 1990). The
toddlers in the Smetana and Braeges (1990) study were more likely to generalize moral issues across contexts (view such issues as unprovoked hitting of another child as wrong both at home and at another day-care setting) than they were to generalize conventions (putting toys away). They
did not, however, make distinctions based on any of the other dimensions
used in that study. By about age 3 1/2, however, children treated moral
and conventional issues differently on the basis of several criteria, including seriousness and rule contingency, as well as generalizability.
The same study demonstrated that children are capable of making rudimentary distinctions between issues of morality and convention during
the third year of life. This study and other work (Nucci and Turiel 1978;
Smetana 1981) have demonstrated that by age 4, children have developed
fairly consistent and firm differentiations between familiar moral and conventional issues encountered in home or preschool settings. As children
become older, their understandings of moral and conventional issues are
extended beyond events with which the children have had direct personal
experience to include the broad range of issues, familiar and unfamiliar
alike, which constitute moral and conventional forms of social events
(Davidson, Turiel, and Black 1983). Moreover, as children develop, they
become better able to apply more abstract criteria, such as cross-cultural
generalizability, to differentiate between issues within the two domains.
Studies that examine whether children differentiate between morality
and convention have not been limited to the United States or Western contexts, but have been conducted across a wide range of the worlds cultures. Such studies have been conducted with children and adolescents in
northeastern Brazil; preschool children in St. Croix, the Virgin Islands;
Christian and Moslem children in Indonesia; urban and kibbutz Jewish
children and traditional village Arab children in Israel; children and
adults in India; children and adolescents in Korea; Ijo children in Nigeria;
and children in Zambia. (For a complete listing of these studies see
Smetana 1995a or Turiel 1998a.) With some variations in specific findings
regarding convention, the distinction between morality and convention
has been reported in each of the cultures examined. Only one study
(Shweder et al. 1987) has claimed to have obtained data indicating that individuals within a non-Western culture (members of a temple village in
India) make no distinction between morality and convention, and that result has been disputed by findings from a subsequent study (Madden

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